THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES FOUR ENGLISH HUMOURISTS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY a FOUE ENGLISH HUMOUEISTS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY LECTURES DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION OF GREAT BRITAIN IN JANUARY AND FEBKUAKY, 1895 By WILLIAM SAMUEL LILLY HONORAKY FELLOW OF I'ETEKHOUSE, CASIBKIUGE Ic.li kaiiii In BolcheB Aachen niir dem eigncu Licht, Nicht fremdem folgeu. . ScraLLEK LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET 1895 LONDON : rKlNl'ED BV WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, STAMFOKD STUEET AND CHARING CROSS. ?R ^'^ TO JAMES DEWAR, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S., FELLOW OF PETERHOUSE AND JACKSONIAN PROFESSOR OF EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE; FULLERIAN PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY IN THE ROYAL INSTITUTION OF <1REAT BRITAIN. My deae Dewae, There are two reasons why I have asked your kind permission to dedicate this vohime to you. First, I am desirous to take the present oppor- tunity of publicly thanking you and the other members of the Governing Body of Peterhouse, for electing me an Honorary Fellow of that most ancient Society. The distinction is one of which, in any circumstances, I must be deeply sensible. It is enhanced by the lustre which your European, your world-wide renown sheds upon our College. Again, I feel special satisfaction in writing your name here, as it was, I believe, at your suggestion that the Managers of the Royal Insti- tution did me the honour of inviting me to deliver fi.r\..^ ^>e^A ( vi ) these Lectures. I could well wish that they were worthier of being thus associated with you. But you were so kind as to say that you listened to them with pleasure. And I may be permitted to say that — " 1 feel a free, A leafy luxury, seeing I could please With these poor offerings, a man like thee." I am, my dear Dewar, Most sincerely yours, W. S. LILLY. Athenaeum Club, May 24, 1895. ADVEETISEMENT. These Lectures, delivered from a few brief notes, are now printed from the shorthand-writer's report. But the Author has corrected such faults, whether of expression or con- ception, as he has detected, and has developed some trains of thought which it was not possible for him to follow out so fully as he could have wished when speaking at the Royal Institution. SUMMARY. LECTUEE I. THE HUMOURIST AS DEMOCRAT. DICKENS. PAGE Definition of the word " humourist : " An artist lolio play- fully gives us his intuition of the ivorld and human life . 3 This large sense of the word is somewhat new — at all events in English. But the world has in all ages possessed gifted souls to whom, if so understood, it may be fitly applied 6 In this age the novel is the ordinaiy vehicle of humour. But there are humourists — Carlyle for example — who find other forms of composition more suitable to their temperament and genius 9 In these Lectures, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Carlyle will be considered as typical English humourists of the nineteenth century : Dickens being The Humourist as Democrat, Thackeray, The Humourist as Philosopher, G eorge Eliot, The Humourist as Poet, and Carlyle, The Humourist as Prophet . . .11 These descriptions are not exclusive, but indicate the endowment predominant in each . . . .12 It is proposed in these Lectures not to analyze and com- pare the humour of these four writers, but rather to b SUMMABY. PAGE consider what is the substantive contribution of each to the world's literature, what his real message to his day and generation and to us . . . . .12 From the point of view of literary art, Dickens is the least important of the four. The spell of his strong magnetic personality has now vanished ; and it must be allowed that his personages are mostly insig- nificant, his incidents mostly vulgar; that much of his thought is crude, that much of his diction is inept . . . . . . . . . .13 He is really one of the least artistic of writers, and he is at his best in his earlier works, where he makes small pretension to art. PicJcioicJc is, perhaps, his masterpiece .... ... 14 He toiled during the whole of his literary life to reach a higher standard ; and he seems to have most nearly attained it in David Copperjield . . . . .14 No doubt he did much good work in the way of genre painting after David Copperjield; but the high art which he tried to grasp ever eluded him ... 15 The fact is that his manner is hopelessly common. And " manner is the constant transpiration of character." Great genius as he was, he never overcame the vul- garity of his early education. He represents the invasion of the novel by the democratic spirit . . 16 But out of his limitations came his strength. His ignor- ance of the great literary traditions of the Western world threw him back upon himself; upon his own observation, his own experience, his own creative gift ....... . . .17 He possessed vigour and originality in a singular degree. His violent and lurid imagination invested his SUMMABY. xi PAGE characters with vivid reality. His ideas are strongly dramatic, or rather melodramatic . . . .17 The foundation of his character was passionate sensibility, which found vent, with equal readiness, in laughter and in tears . 19 He excelled equally in burlesque, in caricature, and in pathos. Specimens of his excellence in these three styles 19 So much concerning Dickens as a literary artist. His special work was to democratize the novel , . 27 He revealed the masses to the classes, first making us realize the degradation and want and misery sur- rounding wealthy and comfortable homes . . .27 He revealed the masses to themselves, touching and attracting them as no writer before him had touched and attracted them, and doing a great work for the idealization of common life ..... 28 It is not easy to overrate the debt under which he has thereby laid the world. He, more than any one else, laboured to deliver the common people from the debased and vulgar Positivism which is a special danger of the present day ...... 29 But there is another sense in which Dickens may be called TJie Humourist as Democrat. While standing aloof from party politics, which he regarded with contempt and loathing, he fought strenuously, throughout his life, for the enfranchisement and elevation of the masses. He was indefatigable in the cause of real reform ; and he eifected much . . 30 What his permanent place will be in English literature is a question which cannot, as yet, be answered. xii SUM3IABY. LECTUEE II. THE HUMOURIST AS PHILOSOPHER. TIIACKEEAY. r.vf.E His popularity with the masses is still very great; but he is grievously wanting in form, which is what gives vitality to a book. Moreover, his sentimental realism is not the highest order of romantic fiction, although he is by far the greatest English exponent of it ^-^ "Every inch of him an honest man," was Carlyle's observation on hearing of his death. And the ethical sentiment which breathes through his pages may well cover a multitude of sins of taste . . 33 Taine's indictment of Thackeray. The chief count in it is that Thackeray is a philosopher, contemplating the passions satirically, not as poetic forms, but as moral qualities. Minor offences of Thackeray, according to Taine, are misanthrojiy and cynicism, the insignificance of his characters, and his levelling tendencies ......... 37 Taine's complaint of Thackeray as a moral philosopher will first be considered. It rests upon the position that the novelist should be " a psychologist and nothing more, painting the passions and sentiments of the soul as they are, and not troubling himself with their ethical worth and significance" . . 30 It may be conceded that a novelist should be a psycho- logist. But what is psychology ? . . . .41 SUMMARY. xiii PAGE The word means tlie branch of philosophy which studies the human mind or soul. But for Taine and his school the soul is merely a poetic expression, a rhetorical figure ; and what is called mental activity, is really sensuous consciousness. For Taine psycho- logy is merely a subordinate department of biology : he reduces it to molecular physics .... 42 If this is the true account of psychology, no doubt the ethical idea is an intruder there. For physical science is wholly the science of the senses, and knows nothing of justice and injustice, right and wrong, moral good and moral evil .... 41 If the novelist is a psychologist in this sense, it may be granted that he has nothing to do with ethics, for ethics in any true meaning of the word do not exist for him ......... 42 But this is not a true conception of psychology. Psycho- logy is not a history of phenomena conventionally styled psychical, but really physical. It is the science of a real indivisible agent, the mind, soul, or thinking- principle which is a man's true self. The unity of the Ego is its starting-point ...... 42 If psychology be thus conceived of, the novelist, in his capacity of psychologist, is concerned with men not as mere matter in motion, but as animated by minds or souls. And the very first fact about the mind or soul is that it is endowed with perceptions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, and the like. Conscience, the power of volition, the moral senti- ments, moral habits, moral responsibility, are primary psychical facts. With them the novelist, qua psychologist, is necessarily concerned ... 43 xiv SUMMARY. PAGE Tlie novel sliould be the image of the human soul. And the two chief elements of a good novel are truth and passion .44 The first equipment of a novelist for his task is the per- ception of the true — that is, of the double character of ideality and phenomenality possessed by all human things. The essence of romantic fiction is the close union of all tlie elements of the composition with the ideal which they contain ..... 44 From tliis union of the phenomenal and the ideal a novel derives that character of truth which touches us by its relation with our double nature. There must be an ethical ideal of some sort in it — be that ideal right or wrong, spurious or genuine — if it is to be true to life : for man is an ethical animal. Of all human ideals, the moral comes first. It embraces our entire being ; other ideals only segments thereof . . 44 The proper vocation of the artist in romantic fiction, as of all artists, is to elevate, to idealize, to refine . . 45 Here is the true distinction between art and physical science. Physical science deals with all the facts, regardless of their ethical significance. The artist in romantic fiction is not concerned with all the facts. His work is essentially poetical. And the first duty of the poet is choice ....... 45 The great ethical principles of reserve, respect, reverence, shame, proscribe limits to imagination as to action. The passions are largely and legitimately the subject of the novelist ; but he should deal with them as an artist, not as a physiologist ..... 45 The ethos of a widely read novel is a most important question. And the ethos comes out in the author's SUMMABY. XV PAGE treatment of his subject, rather than in his choice of personages, his plot, or his catastrophe ... 46 The true test of the merit or demerit of a novel is the impression left on a healthy mind ; a mind infected neither by pruriency nor by prudery ... 47 When the sensuous impression overpowers the spiritual, we have a bad book 48 Applying these principles to the novelist's treatment of sexual love, we may say that while the physiologist is concerned with it as a mere animal impulse, he, in his character of psychologist, is concerned with it as transformed, in greater or less degree, by the imaginative faculty ....... 49 View taken of this matter by Balzac, with whom Taine compares Thackeray ....... 50 No doubt Thackeray is far inferior in genius to Balzac, nor has he Balzac's talent. But the two men had in common certain natural endowments, originality of intellect, perspicuity of observation, a warm and potent instinct of practical life, and a curious divinatory power ....... 51 Such were some of Thackeray's most striking natural en- dowments for his work as a humourist. His training at the Charterhouse and at Cambridge, his travels in Germany and France, and the time spent by him at an Inn of Court supplied him with his intellectual preparation for his destined task . . . .51 His loss of fortune, in early manhood, drove him to literature as a profession ; and a grievous domestic affliction which befell him, gave him the moral dis- cipline required for deepening and strengthening his character ......... 53 xvi SUMMABY. PAGK His literary apprenticeship of twelve or thirteen years was a period of unremitting labour. It was not until 1846, that the publication of his Snoh Pa])ers in Punch established his reputation as a master of his craft . 55 The Book of Snobs is a masterpiece of humour. Its play- fulness is of the satiric order. The keen vivacious satire of an accomplished man of the world is Thackeray's distinctive note as a humourist . . 56 Vindication of Thackeray from Taine's charge of levelling tendencies 56 The publication of Vanity Fair, in 1847, marked Thackeraj^'s advent from obscurity and poverty to fame and com- parative afSuence. Singular literary merits of the book. The reputation made by it maintained by his later works 58 Thackeray's great veracity as a literary artist ... 59 Thackeray paints life as it is. And he knew that life rests upon elementary moralities. His books are his experiences of life, his observations of life, his medita- tions upon life, dramatized, so to speak, and put upon his mimic stage. And the ethos of the drama is ethical 61 Philosophy, in the narrow and technical sense of meta- physics, cannot be ascribed to him. But he was a philosopher in the wider sense of a genuine lover of wisdom, an eager student of real existence . . 61 His philosophy of life comes into special prominence iu all his writings, it is his distinguishing charac- teristic, and should be accounted his peculiar merit . 61 He was not a misanthrope, as Taine asserts. Clearly as he saw, and vividly as he painted, the seamy side SUMMABY. xvii '»'■ LECTUKE III. THE HUMOURIST AS POET. GEOBGE ELIOT. PAGE of society, he saw with equal clearness and painted with equal vividness, the truth and incorruptuess, the purity and goodness, the love and pity which exist side by side with the abounding evil ; and he discerned in these things the real goods of existence . 62 His " good people " are not contemptible and unin- teresting ......... 63 Nor was he a cynic or a mere satirist. He appeals to our primary moral sympathies, our fundamental ethical beliefs, our highest spiritual instincts : and springs of tenderness and pathos are ever Avelling up in his writings ......... 64 His moral philosoplij- breathes the spirit of Kant, although we may be quite sure that he had never read a line of that master. It is underlain by three great principles, which are distinctly Kantian : the per- sonality of man, the probationary character of human life, and the existence of a state beyond the phe- nomenal, wliere the triumph of the moral law will be assured ........ 66 The highest aspect of Thackeray's work . .72 The deadness of ordinary life 75 Various instruments of spiritual awakening : religion, external nature, and art . . . .77 xviii SUMMABY. PAGE Nature and art are essentially religious, in the highest signification of the word ...... 79 The form of art which appeals most widely is the poetic ; and at the present time tlie function of poetry is of ever-growing importance . . . . . .79 In these da3-s the most widely influential poets are those who do not employ metrical forms . . . .81 It must be remembered that poetry is independent of those forms. " The accomplishment of verse " is not of its essence ......... 81 Truth has two modes of expression : the language of fact and the language of fancy ; the tongue of the phe- nomenal and the tongue of the ideal. The true anti- thesis is not between prose and poetry, but between prose and verse ........ 82 To appreciate verse demands much more culture than to appreciate prose. And in this age literature has become democratized. Poets who are content to be unmetrical, command many more readers than poets who write in verse. For a long time to come the novelist, according to his inspiration and in proportion to his power, is likely to be the most popular, the most successful preacher of ideal truth ... 82 In George Eliot we have The Humourist as Poet. Her humour is of the Socratic order. Her truest poetry is in her novels ......-• 84 She possessed in an eminent degree the " six powers requi- site for the production of poetry," which Wordsworth has enumerated . . . . • • .86 The ethos of her prose poetry has been sometimes mis- apprehended. She has been described as " the most influential Positivist writer of her age : " and as SUMMABY. XIX PAGE " the first gi'eat godless writer of fiction that has appeared in England "..,... 90 No doubt she was in a sense a Positivist. Bnt she was not an influential Positivist writer. The writings in which she expounded her philosophy, such as it was, exercised little influence. And her novels were not a vehicle for Positivist propagandism ... 91 To George Eliot, the artist — whatever she may have held as a philosopher — the great Theistic idea was the source of her deepest and most powerful inspiration . 93 Tn the artist the logical understanding does not hold the first place. True art is a kind of inspiration. And this is sufficient to explain how the negative conclu- sions which George Eliot held intellectually, may be reconciled with the vivid realization of Theistic faith which is so marked a characteristic of her novels . 97 In this union of Positivism and Mysticism she is typical of her age ......... 98 The ethos of her prose poetry is essentially that of the great tragedians of ancient Hellas ; her function was " that of the aesthetic, not the doctrinal teacher, the rousing of the nobler emotions " .... 99 There is a strong spiritual affinity between her and Euripides . . . . , . . . .100 The absolute and indefeasible claim of the Divine Law upon our obedience — whatever account she may have given to herself of that law — and the inexorable- ness of its penal sanctions, are the deep underlying thought of George Eliot . . . . . .101 " From the bare diagram of Brother Jacob to the profound and finished picture of Middlcmarch, retribution is the constant theme and motive of George Eliot's art " 102 XX SUMMABY. PAGE The influence of her works is singularly ennobling. She is the great tragic poet of our age . . . .113 Edmond Scherer's judgment of her . . . . .113 LECTUEE IV. THE HUMOURIST AS rROPHET. CABLYLE. Widespread veneration for Carlyle during the last twenty or thirty years of his life 117 " Explosion of the doggeries " shortly after his death . 118 In extenuation of his faults, ma}' be pleaded his intense sensitiveness, the melancholy ever attendant on genius, the sadness impressed upon peasant life in Scotland, and his constant suffering from dyspepsia . 119 Perhaps the dyspepsia Avas an incident of his prophetic calling 122 A humourist he is in the fullest sense of the word . .123 And lie is The Humourist as Fropliet ; seeing, by virtue of the insight, the inspiration, that is in him, through phenomena into reality, rightly reading and inter- preting the signs of the times ..... 125 His spiritual history. ....... 126 His obligations to Goethe 131 Rejects much of his hereditary Calvinism, but retains what he regards as its two elemental and self- evident facts 133 SUMMARY. xxi PAGE His Theism ........ . 133 His ethics . • 135 It appeared to him that the fundamental truths of religion and morals which he so strongly held, had largely- lost their hold upon men's hearts and lives . .137 Side by side with a profession of Christianity not con- sciously false, he found practical Atheism . . .139 And the Utilitarian philosophy appeared to him the^ap- propriate philosophy of an age of practical Atheism . 139 Our political, our social arrangements, appeared to him unveracious, unjust, and doomed. That, as he con- sidered, was the meaning of the popular movement throughout Evirope, little as its leaders knew . .140 In his article Corn Law Bliymes which appeared in 1832, his outlook on the condition of the world is clearly indicated ......... 142 And from that time until 1867, when he published his Niagara, he felt from time to time " a kind of call and monition" to lift up his testimony concerning the condition of England : whence his Chartism, his Past and Present, his Latter Day Pamphlets . .143 Veneration for, conformity with, loyalty to truth — this was the Alpha and Omega of his spiritual and intellectual life . . . . • • • • • .151 He found the political order reared on one fundamental lie — the right of all men, whatever their capacity or incapacity, to an equal share of political power ; and the economic order upon another fundamental lie, ex- pressed in the phrase, " the greatest happiness of the greatest number " 152 xxii SUM3IABY. I' AGE To the cult of majorities, Carlyle oj^posed the cult of superiorities ; to the rule of the multitude, the necessit}'- of loyalty and obedience .... 15-t To the purely empirical doctrine based on calculations of profit and loss, that happiness, or agreeable feeling, is the test of all rules of conduct and the end of life, Carlyle opposed the fundamental, aboriginal, inde- composable idea of riglit as a divine order ruling throughout the universe ...... 156 Further, Carlyle discerned and declared, that at the root of Eousseauan egalitarianism and Benthamite utilitarianism there lay a false concej)tion of human freedom, an untrue doctrine of man's autonomy, issuing, in the one case, in the tyranny of the mob, in the other, in the tyranny of capitalists . . .158 Carlyle judged that the condition of human freedom is in obedience to law issuing from the nature of things : that liberty to find one's appointed woi'k in the world and to do it, is alone real liberty . . . .158 The true description of the political and economical con- dition of this age appeared to Carlyle to be not liberty but anarchy ........ 159 The assertion sometimes made that Carlyle sympathized with the socialistic movement is partly true. In so far as that movement is a protest against the political and economical anarchy of our day and on behalf of the reorganization of the commonwealth, Carlyle did sympathize with it . . . . . . .161 Carlyle agreed with the Socialists in holding that work is a social function and property a social trust : that the great economic problem of the age is the proper division of the fruits of labour, and that we can no SUMMARY. xxiii throughout his life was one of devout and grateful reverence ......... PAGE longer leave that division " to be scrambled for by the law of the strongest, law of sujjply-and-demand, law of Laissez-faire, and other idle laws and unlaws " 163 But Carlyle did not believe in the equal distribution of physical comfort — the Utopia which many of the leaders of the socialistic movement are looking for, and, as they suppose, hastening unto — any more than he believed in the equal distribution of political power 107 Moreover, between Carlyle and the most widely popular school of Socialism there was a great gulf fixed. Carlyle's political and economical doctrines are the outcome of his Theism and his transcendental con- ception of duty. That school is frankly atheistic and utterly unethical ; and its teaching would have been reprobated by Carlyle as " a deadly plague " . 167 In Carlyle's political and social doctrine the sacred rights and inalienable prerogatives of human personality appear to be inadequately recognized . . .172 And in his religious belief precious elements that the world cannot do without, seem to be lacking . .173 Though personally unable to associate himself with any Christian Church or sect, his attitude to Christianity 173 And as years went on, his sympathies with existing religions grew larger . . • • • .175 Valediction ......... 175 K LECTUEE I. THE HUMOUKIST AS DEMOCEAT. DICKENS. B FOUK ENGLISH HUMOUKISTS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTUKY. LECTUEE I. THE HUMOUEIST AS DEMOCEAT. DICKENS. It is a dictum of Cicero that every rational discussion should begin with a definition. I hope that the four Lectures which I shall have the honour and the pleasure of delivering here, will be rational discussions. And, therefore, I will not neglect the monition of the great Roman dialec- tician. I will begin by endeavouring to place before you a definition of the word "humourist." The title of these Lectures, as I need hardly say, has been suggested to me by Thackeray. Let us turn to his English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, and see how he accounted of the humourist. He tells us — " The humourous writer proposes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness — 4 DICKENS. [LECT. your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture — your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all the ordi- nary actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon himself to be the weekday preacher, so to speak." Now, this seems to me as excellent as it is admirably expressed. It is not a definition, indeed. But it will help us towards one. The ordinary actions and passions of life are the subject of the humourist. But he brings to them what the Germans call jSchauen, vision, intuition. He sees those ordinary actions and passions more clearly than we see them. Custom dulls the perception of most of us. The obvious — that which is imme- diately before our eyes — is what we know least accurately. But more. The humourist is not merely a spectator of the ordinary actions and passions of life. He pierces below the surface of things to the secret recesses of the moral world. He is an observer of manners and of psychological facts ; a student of character and of external nature ; a painter of social phenomena and of the reveries of the solitary heart. He holds up the mirror to nature, the magic mirror of artistic imagination. And in it he reveals to us our environment and ourselves. His study, his obser- vation, supply him with the materials wherewith his genius is to body forth an image of man and I.] GENIUS AND TALENT. 5 society. I use the word "genius" advisedfy. Mere closeness of observation, skill in delineation, taste and judgment in arranging the incidents of his fable, a certain power of idealization, are necessary to him ; but they are not enough. Carlyle rightly considered humour the character- istic of the highest order of mind. To constitute a man a humourist, in the full sense of the word, he must possess that creative gift which is the special characteristic of genius. Let us dwell on this a little ; it is worth while. For all the difference between talent and genius is here. Talent is merely imitative, and all imita- tion is more or less false. But genius is creative. And all its creations are, in a sense, real. I do not mean that they necessarily correspond with phenomenal reality. In a work of fantasy they do not. There never was an old sailor like the ancient mariner in that wonderful poem which is the high-water mark of Coleridge's genius. But the ancient mariner is pre-eminently a real creation, a living type. The types which come from the hands of genius are living types. It is not that the man of genius has imagination and that the man of talent has it not. It is rather — Goethe, as I remember, has admirably expressed this — that there are two kinds of imagination, the passive and the active. We all have passive imagination in a greater or less degree. And by means of it we apprehend the images of sensible 6 DICKENS. [lect. things, and reproduce them in our memory, and associate them with material objects. But the incommunicable attribute of genius is that active imagination which constrains exterior objects to express the artist's thought. This is the divine endowment of those select few who alone, in any- true sense, can be called poets — creators, that is — whether they use the brush, the chisel, the musical instrument, or the pen, to body forth what they discern in the high reason of their fancies. This the humourist has in common with other artists. What is his differentia^ as the technical phrase is, his special note, his characteristic endowment ? It is that he treats his subject with a certain playfulness. It may be the grim playfulness of the tiger, as in Swift, or the sportive playfulness of the kitten, as in Gay. But, whatever its form — and there are a great many forms which it may assume — that it is which differentiates the humourist from other artists. And now I think we may get our definition. The humourist, we may say, is an artist who playfully gives us his intuition of the world and human life. He is admirably pictured in the description of Horace which we owe to Persius — " Omne vafer vitium ridenti Flaccus amico Tangit et admissus circum prsecordia ludit." I suppose this large sense of the word is some- what new — in English, at all events. I am not sure I.] WHAT IS A EUMOUBIST? 7 that any of our writers before Thackeray used it iu so wide a significance. But certainly the world has, in every age, possessed highly gifted souls to whom it may, if so understood, be fitly applied. Sm'ely the old Hebrew sage to whom we owe the book of Ecclesiastes, Koheleth, if that is a proper name — it probably is not — was a humourist of no mean order. M. Eenan has pictured him as " old, decrepit, and exhausted," having drained the cup of life, and then moraHzing over its lees. Whether that account be true or not, certainly Koheleth's summary of human Hfe, "Vanity of vanities — all is vanity," is true, not of an age, but for all time ; while we have the humourous application of that great verity — '' sapientia ludens in orbe terrarum " in the precept, '' Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart, for God now accepteth thy works ; let thy garments be always white, and let thy head lack no oint- ment ; live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest, all the days of the life of thy vanity : " sportive kind advice, which is, I suppose, the Hebrew equivalent of the Horatian " carpe diem." The great Hellenic humourist is Aristophanes. What brilliancy of sarcasm, what exuberance of wit light up his vivid page ! With what inimit- able playfulness, does he paint the picture of his times ; for example, in The Clouds, the most perfect, as I think, of all his comedies. And I may add, what a satire is it on him — the grim 8 DICKENS. [LECT. humour of events — that honest as I do not doubt his intentions were, he should have succeeded in so completely misrepresenting the noblest of his countrymen ; nay, that he should have contributed, as I fear we must hold he did, to " the foulest deed save one that ever disgraced the annals of our race — the accusation and execution of Socrates." The typical Eoman humourist I take to be Horace. I like to picture him to myself, sauntering along the Via Sacra, '' nescio quid meditans nugarum et totus in ilHs : " meditating playfully on " trifles " which were to issue in those perfectly chiselled odes of his, the delight of cultivated men for eighteen generations since ; or in those inimitable satires, as they may be truly called, for even Pope's imita- tions of them — far and away the best — fall very far short of the originals. In the Middle Ages I suppose Boccaccio stands out as the greatest humourist. Landor has well said : '' In touches of nature, in truth of character, in the vivacity and versatility of imagination, in the narrative, in the descriptive, in the playful, in the pathetic, the world never saw his equal, until the sunrise of Shakespeare." " The sunrise of Shakespeare " ! Yes. Here as elsewhere he is the supreme artist : the humourist — " whom we know full well The world's wide spaces cannot parallel." He is not merely the gi-eat poet of human nature in all times. He is also the most humourous I.] TEE OBDINABY VEHICLE OF EU310UB. 9 delineator of life and society in the sixteenth century. Of the great humourist to whom the world owes Don Quixote — that unique monument of Spanish genius, at the moment when it descended from the sphere of chivalrous ideahsm to grovel in the dust — I must not speak. I must not even glance at the humourists of France, although it is hard to pass by in silence such old and cherished friends as Eabelais and Montaigne, or at those of Germany and Italy. I need say nothing of our own humourists of the last century, concerning whom Thackeray has written so well. I have said enough, perhaps, to indicate the sense in which I use the words '' humour " and "humourist," and so to make, as I trust, a fair start. I go on to observe that in this age of ours the novel is the most ordinary vehicle of humour. Johnson defined the novel as "a short tale, generally of love." The " short tale " has developed, at all events in this country, into the familiar three volumes. Its chief theme is still the most universal, the most masterful of passions ; yet it claims to survey the whole field of human action. The political novel, the military novel, the religious novel, are well-known varieties of it. And there are those who are by way of giving us the scientific novel. The vast space which romantic fiction occupies in contemporary literature is a curious fact well worth pondering. Here, I must 10 DICKENS. [LECT. content myself with observing that it corresponds with and supplies a universal want. " The trivial round, the common task, Would furnish all we ought to ask," the familiar and beautiful lines tell us. Well, but they do not. There is in man an invincible tendency to break away from the limits of the actual, to escape from "the trivial round, the common task" into the realms of imagination. The function — a perfectly legitimate and whole- some function — of the novel is to minister to this tendency. Side by side with the material life is the ideal life. The novelist paints the ideal life. Man is perennially interesting to man. And this age of ours is specially introspective. That is one of its chief characteristics. It loves to contem- plate itself; to see itself delineated with its passions, its manners, its vices, its virtues, its contrasts, its wants, its secret struggles and violent excitements. And when this is done by a true artist, the charm is very great. Perhaps a novel of a really high order is the most attractive — the most seductive, I may say — of all the works of the human intellect. And this comes partly from the freedom which the artist in romantic fiction enjoys. He may give us historical truth, without being in bondage to official details. His philosophy may be profound, without the fetters of system. He may write poetry of a high order, unshackled by metre or rhyme. It is not surprising that our I.] TYPICAL ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. 11 great humourists in this age generally become novelists. Generally, not always. There are those, Carlyle for example, who find other forms of composition more suitable to their temperament and genius. Now, in the Lectures which I have thought proper to introduce to you with these observations, I propose to say something about four writers whom I consider typical English humourists of this century so near its close. They are Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Carlyle. The question at once occurs, Why these ? I will tell you. In the first place it would be highly inexpedient, for reasons which will be obvious, to select any but those " unto whose greatness death hath set his seal." I confine myself, therefore, to masters who are no longer with us. Of those who have passed away, no doubt there are many who in a sense are typical English humourists. HazHtt, Charles Lamb, Hood, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Lytton, and Peacock are a few whose names at once occur to one. But the four memorable writers whom I have selected, appear to me to occupy a place by themselves, both as expressing and as impressing their age. They are pre-eminently " representative," to use Emerson's phrase — ex- ponents, in their different ways, of the Zeitgeist. In Dickens we have The Humourist as Democrat ; 12 DICKENS. [lect. in Thackeray, The Humourist as Philosopher ; iu George Eliot, The Humourist as Poet ; in Carlyle, The Humourist as Prophet. I must ask you to take these descriptions on trust for the present. I shall hereafter endeavour to vindicate them. But I may here just add the caution that they are not intended to he exclusive. All four of these great humourists were essentially of their age, and were therefore, in a sense, democrats. They were all, in a sense, philosophers, poets, prophets. But I have described each by the endowment which seems to me predominant in him; by the gift which he possessed in largest measure, and of which he made fullest proof. And here let me observe that I shall deal very little with the distinctively humourous element in my four subjects. It would be beside my purpose to analyze and compare their various kinds of playfulness. That has been done over and over again. And I should feel that I had brought you here on false pretences, if I were to do it once more. I shall assume that you know all about that; and I shall follow a line of thought not perhaps so familiar to you. I shall occupy myself specially in considering what the substantive con- tribution of each of these four great writers to the world's literature is ; what is the real message of each to his day and generation, and to us. To speak first then of Dickens. I take him I.] A STRONG MAGNETIC PEBSONALITY. 13 first for several reasons. One reason is that lie comes first chronologically. Another reason is that less time will suffice for speaking of him than for speaking of any of the other three. And the introductory remarks which I have found it necessary to make, have taken up a quarter of my hour. There are, indeed, some points of view from which the work of Dickens may be said to he more important than the work of Thackeray, George Eliot, or even Carlyle. But from the point of view of the literary art he is the least important of the four. Let me first of all speak of him from this point of view. Let me consider him as an artist. The time has now come when we can hope to do that impartially. It could not have been done impartially when the world was under the spell of his strong magnetic personality ; when the hardest head, the most captious critic, had to give in to him. Sydney Smith said, " I resisted Mr. Dickens as long as I could ; but he has conquered me." He conquered every one. He certainly conquered me, as a boy. I now go back to him with an effort. I have looked through those twenty odd volumes of his in preparation for this Lecture. It is the first time for some years that I have opened him. And I confess I marvel at the fascination which he once had for me. I stand aghast at the inane insignificance of most of his personages, at the vapid vulgarity of most of his incidents, at the consummate crudity of 14 DICKENS. [lect. mucli of his thought, at the intolerable ineptness of much of his diction. He was constantly talking — at least in his latter years — of his art. He seems to me one of the least artistic of writers. He is at his best in his earlier works, where he makes small pretence to art. In my opinion his masterpiece is Pickwick — '' a comic middle-class epic " it has been called, perhaps not unhappily. It is irresistibly funny ; inimitably fresh ; incom- parably fantastic ; a farce, but a farce of a very high order. Dickens himself always thought slightingly of it. He was ambitious, laudably ambitious, to do greater things. And during the whole of his literary life he toiled earnestly, passionately, to attain a higher standard. I think he came nearest to that standard in David Copper- field. There is much — verj^ much — there which we could wish away. In fact I, if I take the book up, give effect to my wish, and practically put aside a great deal of it. And no doubt many other readers do the same. But it is informed by a simple power, a sober veracity, a sustained interest, peculiarly its own among its author's works. Dickens's young men are, as a rule, impossible. They are well-nigh all of the same inane type. He seems to have got them out of an Adelphi melodrama. But David Copperfield, who is a transcript from his own troublous and distressed childhood and youth, is, at all events, human. His young women are as inane as his I.] ''DAVID COPPEBFIELD:' 15 young men. His amatory scenes — good heavens let us not speak of them and their mawkish sentimentalities ! What a theme for a poet had he in Steerforth and Little Em'ly ! How George Sand would have treated it ! How George Eliot has treated a similar theme in Adam Bede I But Dickens possessed no words to tell forth that idyll. And if he had possessed them he dared not to have uttered them. He stood in too much awe of Mr. Podsnap's '' young person." The history of the love of Steerforth and Little Em'ly was impossible to him. He could not have narrated it if he would ; and he would not if he could. I think he never again wrote so felicitously as in David Gopperfield. No doubt he did many fine things afterwards in the way of genre paint- ing. We may regard him as a literary Teniers. But as years went on his manner seems to me to grow more unnatural, more stilted, more in- tolerable. The higher art which he tried to grasp, ever eluded him. There is an absence of composition in his work ; there is no play of light and shade ; there is no proportion, no per- spective. His books cannot be said to be com- posed, they are improvised. Consider Our Mutual Friend, which he is stated to have regarded with peculiar satisfaction. I took it up, a few days ago, intending to read it carefully through. I was greatly tempted to lay it down at the 16 DICKENS. [lect. second chapter. Tliat chapter, as some of you will doubtless remember, gives an account of a dinner-party at the Veneerings. I wonder whether anything bearing a less appreciable relation to life was ever written. Twemlow is as unreal as Lord Dundreary, and much less amusing. Lady Tippins is as untrue as she is uninteresting. Was there ever a barrister bearing the remotest likeness to Eugene Wrayburn ? or a solicitor possessing the smallest affinity with Mortimer Lightfoot ? It must be remembered that Dickens professed to be a painter of manners, not an artist working in the domain of fantasy, and so was bound to keep in touch with actual existence. Then the butler, I remember, is likened to an analytical chemist, because when he offers wine to the guests he seems to say, "You wouldn't if you knew what it is made of." And when from time to time that domestic is mentioned, he is styled " The Analytical Chemist." This seems to me by no means exquisite fooling. The whole book is ghastly and phantasmal, notwithstanding the vivid flashes of genius which illuminate it here and there. The fact is that Dickens's manner is as common as it can be. A very acute French critic once remarked to me " Sa maniere d'ecrire est tout-a- fait bourgeoise ; " and that is the truth. But, according to Sir James Makintosh's happy dictum, manner is the constant transpiration of character. r.] '' PICTURES FROM ITALY." 17 If we want a self-revelation of Dickens, we have only to look at his Pictures from Italy — the worst thing he ever perpetrated. Of course there are touches of his fine genius in it, as there are in all his writings ; for example, that account of the cicerone at Mantua, than which Sterne never did anything better. But, taken as a whole, it is bourgeois, in the worst sense of the word. It might have proceeded from a very superior bag- man — a bagman of genius. Dickens's genius, great as it was, never enabled him to overcome the vulgarity of his early education. He repre- sents the invasion of the novel by the democratic spirit. One of his French critics has sagaciously remarked, " II etait ne peuple, et il Test toujours demeure." But it is precisely out of Dickens's limitations that his strength came. His ignorance of the great literary traditions of the Western world threw him back upon himself, upon his own observation, his own experience, his own crea- tive gift. No doubt, as the Eoman poet says, the acquisition of the ingenuous arts softens our manners and redeems them from brutahty. But it certainly tends to rub off " the picturesque of man and man;" to substitute form and gloss for vigour and originality. No one can deny that Dickens possessed these qualities of vigour and originality in a singular degree. His violent and lurid imagination, fixed upon one object, became c 18 DICKENS. [lect. a kind of possession. It irresistibly prompted him ; it imperiously commanded him as a revela- tion. I know of no writer whose ideas are more strongly dramatic. He wrote, as the French would say, with his temperament. He lived in his work. The children of his brain were as real to him as the children of his flesh and blood. And it is precisely because they were so real to him, that they are real to us. It is true that he exhibits, often enough, caricatures, monsters, deformities. But they live in his pages by the power of his creative genius, though in actual life they have no existence. It is well observed by Mrs. Eitchie, in her charming book, Chapters from some Memoirs. " One sees people in Dickens's pages; their tricks of expression, their vivid sayings, their quaint humour and oddities, do not surprise one ; one accepts everything as a matter of course, no matter how unusual it may be." This was the result of that strong dramatic genius of his which came out, very early in his career, in his shorthand reports of proceedings in the police courts for the Chronicle newspaper; and which, in his maturer life, was displayed so wonderfully in his readings. I have never heard such reading before or since. It was, in fact, one man sustaining three or four characters, and, without the illusion of scenery or costume, bring- ing them before us as vividly as if we saw them I.] PASSIONATE SENSIBILITY. 19 on tlie theatrical stage. I have called his genius dramatic ; it was rather melodramatic. And I confess I do not know anything which affects, which, if I may use the word, fetches one more than a well-sustained melodrama. People some- times talk of Dickens's affectations. Unjustly. His mannerisms, even the most ungainly of them, are part and parcel of the man, just as Sir Henry Irving's well-known stage walk and stage voice are part and parcel of Sir Henry Irving. It was Leigh Hunt who said of Dickens, " He has life and soul enough for fifty men." And the passionate sensibility which Taine considered, rightly, as I think, to be the very foundation of his character, found expression, with equal readiness, in laughter and in weeping. He is one of the very few artists who excel equally in bmlesque, in caricature, and in pathos. He moves us at his will to boisterous merriment, to quiet amusement, to irresistible tears. What more audacious than the buffoonery of Mr. Richard Swiveller ? What more witty than the satire on the Circumlocution Office ? What more touching than the picture of Little Nell ? — Landor's favourite character ; the most perfect bit of pathetic writing since Cordeha, as that savage old critic Jeffrey judged. Yes : in burlesque, in caricature, and in pathos, Dickens has not been surpassed in our literature. Let me give three specimens which, in my judgment, exhibit him at 20 DICKENS. [LECT. his best in each of these styles. As an example of Dickens's power in burlesque, I will read you a story of Mr. Samuel Weller's. You will remember how when Mr. Pickwick chose rather to abide in the Fleet Prison than to pay the damages and costs in the action of Bardell v. PichioicT<:, his faithful body-servant procures his own arrest in order to join his master there. Mr. Pickwick, though greatly touched by this proof of Sam's attachment, remonstrates. " ' I takes my determination on principle, sir,' remarked Sam, ' and you takes yours on the same ground ; vich puts me in mind o' the man as killed his-self on principle, vich o' course you've heerd on, sir.' Mr. Weller paused when he arrived at this point, and cast a comical look at his master out of the corners of his eyes. " ' There is no of course in the case, Sam,' said Mr. Pickwick, gradually breaking into a smile in spite of the uneasiness which Sam's obstinacy had given him. ' The fame of the gentleman in question never reached my ears.' " ' No, sir,' exclaimed Mr. Weller. ' You astonish me, sir ; he wos a clerk in a guv'ment office, sir.' '' ' Was he ? ' said Mr. Pickwick. "'Yes, he wos, sir,' replied Mr. Weller; 'and a wery pleasant gentleman too — one o' the percise and tidy sort, as puts their feet in little india- rubber fire-buckets ven its vet veather, and never has no other bosom friends but hare-skins ; he saved up his money on principle, wore a clean I.] A STOBr OF MB. SAMUEL WELLEKS. 21 shirt ev'iy day on principle, never spoke to none of his relations on principle, fear they shou'd want to borrow money of him ; and wos altogether, in fact, an uncommon agreeable character. He had his hair cut on principle vunce a fortnight, and contracted for his clothes on the economic prin- ciple — three suits a year, and send back the old vuns. Being a werry reg'lar gen'lm'n he din'd ev'ry day at the same place, vere it wos one and ninepence to cut off the joint ; and a werry good one and ninepence worth he used to cut, as the landlord often said, vith the tears a tricklin' down his face, let alone the vay he used to poke the fire in the vinter time, vich wos a dead loss o' four- pence ha'penny a day, to say nothin' at all o' the aggrawation o' seein' him do it. So uncommon grand vith it too ! '' Post arter the next gen'lm'n," he sings out ev'ry day ven he comes in. " See arter the Times ^ Thomas ; let me look at the Mornin' Herald, ven it's out o' hand ; don't forget to bespeak the Chronicle; and just bring the 'Tizer, vill you;" and then he'd sit vith his eyes fixed on the clock, and rush out just a quarter of a minit afore the time to vaylay the boy as wos a-comin' in vith the evenin' paper, vich he'd read vith sich intense interest and persewerance, as vorked the other customers up to the wery con- fines of desperation and insanity, 'specially one i-rascible old gen'lm'n as the vaiter wos always obliged to keep a sharp eye on at sich times, 'fear he should be tempted to commit some rash act vith the carving-knife. Veil, sir, here he'd stop, occupyin' the best place for three hours, and 22 DICKENS. [lect. never takin' nofchin' arter his dinner but sleep, and then he'd go avay to a coffee-house a few streets off, and have a small pot o' coffee and four crumpets, arter vich he'd valk home to Kensington and go to bed. One night he wos took wery ill ; sends for the doctor ; doctor comes in a green fly, vith a kind o' Eobinson Crusoe set o' steps as he could let down ven he got out, and pull up arter him ven he got in, to perwent the necessity o' the coachman's gettin' down, and thereby undeceivin' the public by lettin' 'em see that it wos only a livery coat he'd got on, and not the trousers to match. '' Wot's the matter ? " says the doctor. " Wery ill," says the patient. " Wot have you been a-eatin' of?" says the doctor. "Roast weal," says the patient. ''Wot's the last thing you dewoured?" says the doctor. "Crumpets," says the patient. " That's it," says the doctor. " I'll send you a box of pills directly, and don't you never take no more o' them," he saj^s. " No more o' wot?" says the patient — "Pills!" " No ; crumpets," says the doctor. " Wy ? " says the patient, starting up in bed ; " I've eat four crumpets ev'ry night for fifteen year on principle." " Veil, then, you'd better leave 'em off on prin- ciple," says the doctor. "Crumpets is whole- some, sir," says the patient. " Crumpets is not wholesome, sir," says the doctor, wery fiercely. " But they're so cheap," says the patient, comin' down a little, " and so wery fillin' at the price." " They'd be dear to you at any price ; dear if you wos paid to eat 'em," says the doctor. "Four crumpets a night," he says, " vill do your bisness I] 3IB. PODSNAP. 23 in six months ! " The patient looks him full in the face, and turns it over in his mind for a long time, and at last he says : '' Are you sure o' that 'ere, sir?" "I'll stake my professional reputa- tion on it," says the doctor. " How many crumpets at a sittin' do you think 'ud kill me off at once ? " says the patient. " I don't know," says the doctor. " Do you think half a crown's vurth 'ud do it," says the patient. " I think it might," says the doctor. "Three shillin's vurth 'ud be sure to do it, I s'pose ? " says the patient. " Certainly," says the doctor. " Wery good," says the patient; "good night." Next mornin' he gets up, has a fire lit, orders in three shillins' vurth o' crumpets, toasts 'em all, eats 'em all, and blows his brains out.' "'What did he do that for?' inquired Mr. Pickwick, abruptly ; for he was considerably startled by this tragical termination of the narra- tive. "'Wot did he do it for, sir!' reiterated Sam. ' Wy, in support of his great principle that crumpets wos wholesome, and to show that he wouldn't be put out of his vay for nobody ! ' " I know nowhere a more perfect specimen of burlesque than this. And I incline to think that the account of Mr. Podsnap exhibits equal mastery in caricature. " Mr. Podsnap w^as well to do, and stood very high in Mr. Podsnap's opinion. Beginning with a good inheritance he had married a good in- heritance, and had thriven exceedingly in the 24 DICKENS. [lect. Marine Insurauce way, and was quite satisfied. He never could make out why everybody was not quite satisfied, and he felt conscious that he set a brilliant social example in being particularly well satisfied with most things, and above all other things, with himself. Thus happily ac- quainted with his own merit and importance, Mr. Podsnap settled that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence. There was a dignified conclusiveness — not to add a grand convenience — in this way of getting rid of disagreeables, which had done much towards establishing Mr. Podsnap in his lofty place in Mr. Podsnap 's satisfaction. ' I don't want to know about it ; I don't choose to discuss ; I don't admit it ! ' Mr. Pod- snap had even acquired a peculiar flourish of his right arm in often clearing the world of its most difficult problems, by sweeping them behind him (and consequently sheer away) with those words and a flushed face. For they affronted him. "Mr. Podsnap's world was not a very large world, morally ; no, nor even geographically ; seeing that although his business was sustained upon commerce with other countries, he con- sidered other countries, with that important reservation, a mistake, and of their manners and customs would conclusively observe, ' Not Enghsh ! ' when. Presto ! with a flourish of the arm, and a flush of the face, they were swept away. ^ ^ ■s^ ^ * "As a so eminently respectable man, Mr. Podsnap was sensible of its being required of him I.] ^^TEE YOUNG PEBSON." 25 to take Providence under his protection. Con- sequently lie always knew what Providence meant. Inferior and less respectable men might fall short of that mark, but Mr. Podsnap was alw^ays up to it. And it was very remarkable (and must have been very comfortable) that what Providence meant, was invariably what Mr. Podsnap meant. " There was a Miss Podsnap. x\nd this young rocking-horse was being trained in her mother's art of prancing in a stately manner without ever getting on. But the high parental action was not yet imparted to her, and in truth she was but an under-sized damsel, with high shoulders, low spirits, chilled elbows, and a rasped surface of nose, who seemed to take occasional frosty peeps out of childhood into womanhood, and to shrink back again, overcome by her mother's head-dress and her father from head to foot — crushed by the mere dead weight of Podsnappery. "A certain institution in Mr. Podsnap's mind which he called ' the young person,' may be con- sidered to have been embodied in Miss Podsnap, his daughter. It was an inconvenient and exact- ing institution, as requiring everything in the universe to be filed down and fitted to it. The question about everything was, would it bring a blush into the cheek of the young person ? And the inconvenience of the young person was, that, according to Mr. Podsnap, she seemed always liable to burst into blushes when there was no need at aU. There appeared to be no line of demarcation between the young person's exces- sive innocence and another person's guiltiest 26 DICKENS. [lect. knowledge. Take Mrs. Podsnap's word for it, and the soberest tints of drab, white, lilac, and grey, were all flaming red to this troublesome Bull of a young person." Dickens's greatest achievement in the pathetic, perhaps, is the chapter in David Copperfield, en- titled, " A Greater Loss." Little Em'ly has fled. And Ham finds her letter. That letter ! In it we have Dickens's genius without alloy. It is as the very voice of Nature herself. " When you, who love me so much better than I ever have deserved, even when my mind was innocent, see this, I shall be far away. When I leave my dear home — my dear home — oh, my dear home ! — in the morning, it will be never to come back, unless he brings me back a lady. This will be found at night, many hours after, instead of me. Oh, if you knew how my heart is torn. If even you, that I have wronged so much, that never can forgive me, could only know what I sufl'er ! I am too wicked to write about myself. Oh, take comfort in think- ing that I am so bad. Oh, for mercy's sake, tell uncle that I never loved him half so dear as now. Oh, don't remember how affectionate and kind you have all been to me — don't remember we were ever to be married — but try to think as if I died when I was little, and was buried some- where. Pray Heaven that I am going away from, have compassion on my uncle ! Tell him that I never loved him half so dear. Be his comfort. Love some good girl, that will be what I.] TEE DEMOCBATIZING OF THE NOVEL. 27 I was once to uncle, and be true to you, and worthy of you, and know no shame but me. God bless all ! I'll pray for all, often, on my knees. If he don't bring me back a lady, and I don't pray for my own self, I'll pray for all. My parting love to uncle. My last tears, and my last thanks, for uncle ! " I have, perhaps, said enough to indicate the judgment I am led to form of Dickens as a literary artist. A man of the people — he was that by the environment of his childhood and youth, although he belonged by birth to what Matthew Arnold calls ''the lower middles" — a man of the people, without early intellectual culture, and, in spite of the grave limitations and defects chiefly attributable to the want of it, he pushed his way into enormous popularity by sheer force of "his demonic genius." It w^as his work to democratize the novel. This is the secret of that enormous popularity of his — a popularity hardly less great on the Continent of Europe than in the British Empire and the United States of America. Democracy is the great fact of this age — a world-wide fact. And in this fine genius we have " The Humourist as Democrat." The masses, who a century ago were nothing in the public order, are now every- thing, or are fast becoming everything. It w^as the mission of Dickens to reveal the masses to 28 DICKENS. [lect. the classes, to reveal the masses to themselves. He had spent his sad and troublous childhood and youth among them; he knew their way of life, their way of thought, their way of speech; for they have a dialect of their own — more pene- trating, more picturesque, more pathetic than the language of the more refined and cultivated. He first made us realize the degradation and want and misery surrounding the comfortable homes of the upper and middle classes. It is a remark of Taine's — I think it is Taine's — that until we had read Dickens we did not know the depths of pity that exist in our own hearts. There was in him a sympathetic tenderness, a warmth of emotion, which ever and anon well up in his most audacious buffooneries, his most grotesque caricatures, appealing irresistibly to his readers : this is that " true music in the inner man of him," which Carlyle discerned and reverenced. But it was the work of Dickens to reveal the masses not only to the classes but to them- selves. No writer before him had known how so to attract and touch them. He has done more than any other man of our day for the idealization of common life. I do not think it easy to overrate the debt under which he has thereby laid the world. Few of us, I fancy, realize the importance of cultivating the imagina- tion. There the faculty is — part and parcel of I.] TEE EOMEB OF THE 3IASSES. 29 US — and it cannot fust in us unused. Den}^ it a high, a supersensuous ideal, and it mil seek a low, an infi-abestial ideal. I say " infrabestial " advisedly. For men and women devoid of human — that is, supersensuous — ideals, sink, not as is sometimes said, to the level of the beasts, but below it. Now I consider Dickens's biographer well warranted when he writes, " [Dickens's books] have inculcated humanity in familiar and engaging forms to thousands and tens of thousands of then- readers, who can hardly have failed to make [each] his little world around him somewhat the better for their teaching. From first to last they were never for a moment, alien to either the sympathies or the understandings of any class : and there were crowds of people . . . that could not have told you what imagination meant, who were adding, month by month, to their limited stores, the boundless gains of imagination." To him they owe their appreciation of " the dainties that are bred in a book." To them he opened out a new world — which really was their old world transfigured by the magic touch of genius. It appears to me that one of the great dangers of this age is a certain moral dryness. It results from the too complete absorption in "the trivial round, the common task : " from slavery to palpable facts and utilitarian fallacies. Dickens did more than any one else to deHver the common people from this debased and vulgar positivism. 30 DICKENS. [lect. He is the great minister of the ideal to the masses. He is their Homer. But there is another sense in which we may call Dickens "The Humourist as Democrat." Throughout the whole of his literary life he fought strenuously for the elevation and enfran- chisement of the masses ; for moral, social, and political reform. He called himself a Eadical. And so he was, not in the sense the word bears in our party politics, which he ever regarded with contempt and loathing, but in the sense of desiring to lay the axe of reform to the root of existing abuses. From party contests he stood aloof. He thought party leaders indifferent to what he called — he had learnt the phrase from Carlyle — "the condition of England question," and intent merely on dishing their adversaries, and on obtaining or retaining j^lace and power. And this awakened — what wonder ? — his honest scorn and indignation. From time to time attempts were made to induce him to stand for Parliament. He resisted them with something of vehemence. " I declare " — this was his language to certain influential members of a London constituency who approached him with such a request — "I declare that as to all matters on the face of this teeming earth, .it appears to me that the House of Com- mons and Parliament altogether is become just the dreariest failure and nuisance that ever bothered this much-bothered world." And in a I.] TRUE BADICALISM. 31 letter written in 1854, speaking of a certain literary project, lie said, "I gave up with it my hope to have made every man in England feel something of the contempt for the House of Commons that I have. We shall never do any- thing until this sentiment is universal." But, while he turned in loathing from "the din of vociferous platitude and quack out-bellowing quack" within those walls at Westminster, he was from first to last indefatigably active in the cause of real reform. Nor was it in vain that he insisted on the duties of society towards the poor, that he pleaded for the protection of women and children, that he sought to ameliorate the relations between workpeople and their employers, that he inveighed against cruelty in schools, in workhouses, against the law's delays — so scandalous when he began to write — against the frauds of company promoters, the abuses of sinecures, the hypocrisies of false philanthropy and false religionism, the How-not-to-do-it of the Circumlocution Office. And here let it be noted that Dickens did all this good work naturally and unaffectedly. One cannot help being struck by the ease wherewith he intro- duces into his grotesque or pathetic creations some political, social, or moral theme. From first to last, he was one of the simplest and least pretentious of men. What shall we say, then, will be Dickens's 32 DICKENS. [lect. permanent place in English literature ? Perhaps the time has not as yet come when this question can be answered. "The balance in which the works of the masters are weighed, vibrates long before it is finally adjusted." It is hard to believe that so much genius as Dickens undoubtedly pos- sessed, should fail to keep his books alive. Cer- tainly the sale of them is still immense. He is hardly less popular with the masses now than he ever was. That is evident from the great demand for his writings in our Public Libraries. Among the more cultivated, his popularity is undoubtedlj^ on the decline. He reposes undisturbed on the shelves of libraries in country houses. One does not see him in the hands of our young men at public schools or universities. I heard the other day of an Eton boy, a very clever boy, the son of an artist, a friend of my own, who was asked by his father if he had ever read Dickens. He replied, ''No." ''Well," said the father, "you really ought; try Pichvick.'' The boy tried Picktvick, and, after getting through half a volume, came back to his father, saying, " Do you really wish me to go on with it ? I will if you do; but I don't care for it." The truth is that it is form which gives vitality to a book. And Dickens is grievously wanting in form. Moreover, we must remember that Dickens's sentimental reahsm is not the highest order of romantic fiction. He is, however, by far the greatest of its English I.] "EVEBT INCH OF HIM AN HONEST 31 AN" 33 exponents. And tliat proceeds from what I may- call the power of his poetic hallucination, the musicalness of his phrase, and, above all, from the personal emotion, the realized experience of suffering and sadness, which breathe through his pages. To which I may add that, unlike Victor Hugo, whom in many points he resembles, he never falsifies our sympathies. " Everj^- inch of him an honest man," wrote Carlyle, on receiving the tidings of his death. Now Goethe has said that apart from the ethical sentiment the actual is the vulgar, the low, the gross. The ethical sentiment breathes throughout the pages of Dickens, and it may well cover a multitude of sins of taste. Whatever the judgment of posterity may be upon him, we may to-day take leave of him with that judgment of Carlyle, " Every inch of him an honest man." LECTUEE II. THE HUMOUEIST AS PHILOSOPHEE. THA CKEBA Y. ( 37 ) LECTUEE II. THE HUMOURIST AS PHILOSOPHER. TEACKEBAY. M. Taine, in his very valuable and suggestive work on English Literature, introduces what he has to say about Thackeray by a comparison between him and Dickens, which I will read. It is as follows : — " The one more ardent, more expansive, wholly given up to verve, an impassioned painter of crude and dazzling pictures, a lyric prose-writer, all powerful in provoking laughter or tears, plunged into fantastic invention, painful sensibility, vehe- ment buffoonery ; and by the boldness of his style, the excess of his emotions, the grotesque familiarity of his caricatures, he has displayed aU the forces and weaknesses of an artist, all the audacities, all the successes, and all the oddities of the imagina- tion. The other, more self-contained, better in- structed and stronger, a lover of moral dissertations, a counsellor of the public, a sort of lay-preacher, less bent on defending the poor, more bent on censuring man, has brought to the aid of satire a sustained common-sense, great knowledge of the 38 THACKEBAY. [lect. heart, consummate cleverness, powerful reasoning, a store of meditated hatred, and has persecuted vice with all the weapons of reflection." M. Taine then goes on to charge Thackeray with having converted the novel into satire — urged thereto partly by the manners of his country, partly by his own temperament. Thackeray, he complains, instead of contemplating the passions as poetic forms, contemplates them as moral qualities. This, he says, is in accordance with the English taste. And in order to illustrate that view, he goes on to consider the French taste. The French like a novel to be amusing and poUte, he tells us. They would feel hurt if the writers tried to force their convictions by blows struck home (a coups presses) and by solid arguments, by a display of eloquence and indignation. If you speak to them of human wickedness — this I may remark, parenthetically, the French novelist generally does — it must be not to teach but to divert them. The EngHsh are endowed with a grosser, a less mercurial temperament, which is nourished by a heavier and stronger diet. He quotes from Thackeray's own Book of Snobs the dictum that "their usual expression [is one] of intense gloom and subdued agony." They like strong emotions, precise demonstrations. These Thackeray ministers to them with both hands. He gives them the kind of grave, pungent, forcible satire they delight in. n.] TAINE'S INDICTMENT. • 39 M. Taine then institutes a comparison between Thackeray and Balzac. Balzac, he says, makes you feel like a naturalist who has been conducted through a museum possessing a fine collection of specimens and monsters. You rise from reading Thackeray feeling like a stranger who has been taken into the operating room of a hospital on a day when amputations are performed there. In Thackeray he finds the most terrible cynicism, as he might expect to find in one whom he describes as the first of Swift's disciples. In both Swift and Thackeray he discerns not only the same misanthropy, but the same imperturbable gravity, the same soUdity of conception, the same talent of illusion. He confesses, indeed, that Thackeray's misanthropy is not so thoroughgoing as Swift's. But he considers the beings whose tenderness and goodness Thackeray celebrates — Amelia Sedley, Ethel Newcome, Laura, for example — infinitely contemptible ; their love and their goodness, bhnd, instinctive, unreasonable, and ridiculous. Further, Taine finds that Thackeray regards social inequality as a fertile source of injustice, vice, folly; and attributes to him a wish to level down distinctions of rank. " His novels," we are told, " are a war against the upper classes of his country." Finally — and now we come to the root of the matter — Taine insists that the novelist ought to be *' a psychologist and nothing more ; " ''a psychologist who naturally and involuntarily puts psychology 40 THACKEBAY. [lect. in action," painting the passions, the sentiments of the soul as they are, and not troubling himself about their ethical worth or significance. In fact, M. Taine proclaims the "art for art" doctrine, which has of late years been carried to such lengths, and which M. de Maupassant has more succinctly formulated than any one else I know of. " Morality, goodness (I'honnetete), sound principles, are things indispensable to the mainte- nance of the established social order ; but there is nothing in common between the social order and literature; " a strong statement, to which M. Taine, in his quality of historian, might, perhaps, have demurred. M. Taine concludes his criticism of Thackeray by comparing Becky Sharp with Valerie Marneffe, very much to Becky's disadvan- tage. He feels especially injured by the moral reflections, the philosophical meditations, with which Thackeray's novels are interspersed. It would be easy, he complains, to extract from them one or two volumes of ethical essays after the manner of La Bruyere or Addison. In short, M. Taine finds in Thackeray The Humourist as Philo- sopher, and is offended at him. I have been led to dweU at this length upon Taine's indictment of Thackeray, because I think it sums up with singular vigour and directness what has been said, in substance, by a multitude II.] THE NOVEL AND ETHICS. 41 of less able critics. I have a great respect for Taine, whom I regard as, in sorae ways, the first among French men of letters in this centmy. I may add that, slight as was my acquaintance with him, I had also a gi'eat regard for, and a great sympathy with him. And before forming my own judgment on any subject concerning which he has written, I like to see what he has said about it. Now his indictment of Thackeray appears to me quite wrong. And the error comes from this : that here — as not infrequently happened — Taine was the slave of a formula. I shall notice, incidentally, in the course of this Lecture, his complaints of Thackeray's misanthropy and cynicism, of the insignificance of Thackeray's characters, of Thackeray's levelling tendencies. But before I go further, I should like to devote a few minutes to examining the question of the relations between the novel and ethics, a question on which I find myself differing altogether with M. Taine. Is it true, then, that the novel is independent of the great laws and principles of ethics ? I think it is quite untrue. The novelist is a psychologist, Taine tells us. Very well. I have no objection to calling him so. But what is psychology ? The word denotes that branch of philosophy — ttjs xpvxyj's \6yo